Overview

In Totally Truffaut, author Anne Gillain answers two complex riddles: How is experience imprinted into films? What draws audiences to theaters? François Truffaut, like Fellini, Bergman or Scorsese, worked with an autobiographical material and Totally Truffaut follows the coded inscription of major life events in his films from his illegitimate birth to his passionate and doomed relationship with Catherine Deneuve. The book focuses first on the process that embeds experience into fictions, and more specifically into visual forms and patterns. It also tries to define the mode of perception film language triggers in the spectator. When entering a movie theater, we expect perceptual pleasure. Truffaut's creative work is devoted to distilling this drug to audiences, an ambition central to the evolution of his style. These two issues are closely connected and Totally Truffaut follows, film after film, their crisscrossing paths. It also highlights the essential role several great actresses-Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Dorléac, Isabelle Adjani, Jacqueline Bisset, Fanny Ardant or Catherine Deneuve- played in the creation of the films.

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9780197536315

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Reviews

Anne Gillain's book is phenomenal. I dived into every page and learned a thousand things; never before had I understood the importance of Truffaut's work so well. Truffaut invented a world of cinema to which Anne Gillain has found the key. * Arnaud Desplechin, Director * In Anne Gillain, Truffaut found the passionate viewer his films were made to arouse and satisfy, someone preternaturally attuned to his complex emotions yet adroit in deciphering the panoply of techniques he deployed, often slyly and mysteriously, to release feelings into intriguing narratives that bleed onto the screen in unforgettable images and sounds. Adopting both his human warmth and his artistic precision, Gillain has written a novel in 23 chapters with Truffaut as hero, film after film. You can't put it down. * Dudley Andrew, Yale University * Meglin's expertise as well as her passion for her subject matter shine through in her generous, rigorously researched, and comprehensive biography of Ruth Page. Meglin makes a compelling argument for a renewed examination of Page's overlooked contributions: this is a readable and engaging study of an American Midwestern choreographer whose works were unorthodox, experimental, inflected by the rhythms of jazz * and female. *

Anne Gillain's book is phenomenal. I dived into every page and learned a thousand things; never before had I understood the importance of Truffaut's work so well. Truffaut invented a world of cinema to which Anne Gillain has found the key. * Arnaud Desplechin, Director * In Anne Gillain, Truffaut found the passionate viewer his films were made to arouse and satisfy, someone preternaturally attuned to his complex emotions yet adroit in deciphering the panoply of techniques he deployed, often slyly and mysteriously, to release feelings into intriguing narratives that bleed onto the screen in unforgettable images and sounds. Adopting both his human warmth and his artistic precision, Gillain has written a novel in 23 chapters with Truffaut as hero, film after film. You can't put it down. * Dudley Andrew, Yale University * Meglin's expertise as well as her passion for her subject matter shine through in her generous, rigorously researched, and comprehensive biography of Ruth Page. Meglin makes a compelling argument for a renewed examination of Page's overlooked contributions: this is a readable and engaging study of an American Midwestern choreographer whose works were unorthodox, experimental, inflected by the rhythms of jazz * and female.Karen Eliot, Emerita Professor, Department of Dance, The Ohio State University *

Meglin's expertise as well as her passion for her subject matter shine through in her generous, rigorously researched, and comprehensive biography of Ruth Page. Meglin makes a compelling argument for a renewed examination of Page's overlooked contributions: this is a readable and engaging study of an American Midwestern choreographer whose works were unorthodox, experimental, inflected by the rhythms of jazz * and female. *

Anne Gillain's book is phenomenal. I dived into every page and learned a thousand things; never before had I understood the importance of Truffaut's work so well. Truffaut invented a world of cinema to which Anne Gillain has found the key. * Arnaud Desplechin, Director * In Anne Gillain, Truffaut found the passionate viewer his films were made to arouse and satisfy, someone preternaturally attuned to his complex emotions yet adroit in deciphering the panoply of techniques he deployed, often slyly and mysteriously, to release feelings into intriguing narratives that bleed onto the screen in unforgettable images and sounds. Adopting both his human warmth and his artistic precision, Gillain has written a novel in 23 chapters with Truffaut as hero, film after film. You can't put it down. * Dudley Andrew, Yale University * Meglin's expertise as well as her passion for her subject matter shine through in her generous, rigorously researched, and comprehensive biography of Ruth Page. Meglin makes a compelling argument for a renewed examination of Page's overlooked contributions: this is a readable and engaging study of an American Midwestern choreographer whose works were unorthodox, experimental, inflected by the rhythms of jazz * and female. *

Author Information

After earning a PhD at Harvard, Anne Gillain taught courses on French cinema at Wellesley College. She met François Truffaut in 1979 while writing a memoir on his films and remained in touch with in until his death in 1984. This was the prelude to a series of books that have been translated in English by Alistair Fox: François Truffaut: The Lost Secret, Truffaut on Cinema. She also published A Companion to François Truffaut, a volume of articles edited in collaboration with Dudley Andrew.

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